AN ANSWER TO GUN CONTROL ADVOCATES
Joe H. Wilkins, Jr.
Copyright © 2013
I have always been an advocate for US citizens to own and use firearms in a responsible manner. As a boy my father and I spent many hours hunting in the Florida scrubland, hunting for deer, turkeys, doves, and squirrels. To kill the game and bring it home for my mother to cook for us was an exciting time for a young boy. It gave me some measure of purpose in my young life, and I will never forget the good times with my father afield, stalking the game of our choice.

As I matured, and my life changed, the hunting in my life ceased; there were other things to pursue. However, I have never lost the positive feelings I had toward hunting and the proper use of firearms. The lessons I learned with hunting and target practice have served me well over the years: 1) discipline required in stalking elusive game 2) development of precise hand-eye coordination needed to kill a squirrel high in a tree with a single shot .22 rifle 3) the need to be extremely alert tromping through rattlesnake-infested scrubland 4) how to be silent when the occasion demanded 5) how to process youthful, ambivalent feelings of life and death, as we skinned and gutted the game to be eaten later 6) how to respect all wildlife and to kill only game that would be eaten later 7) and how to have the proper relationship and attitudes toward guns.

When I joined the military after high school, out of sixty men in my unit, I was second in marksmanship. Handling that .30 cal. M-1 carbine came very naturally to me, with the targets extremely easy to hit. I felt very good and well prepared for combat should the need ever arise—which, thankfully, never happened.

These thoughts stirred in me after talking to a good friend, regarding those people in our country who want to outlaw and/or restrict the use of firearms in America. At first glance it is easy to see why many people without proper experience with firearms, or who have had negative experiences, would support banning firearms. These people may have been emotionally traumatized by violent movies and TV programs, or taught to fear them by family and friends, or taken their anti-gun positions from the philosophies of those people who have concluded that to stop the misuse of firearms we need to ban them altogether. This later position is the “throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater” approach.
The problem with all these ideas is that they are targeted only to the “good” firearm people and don’t apply to those who would use them to murder or rob.

Let’s consider another anti-gun position, which I think is based on faulty reasoning. The basic problem with guns is that some people feloniously misuse them to commit various crimes. Then, law-abiding citizens become alarmed and disturbed by these people’s actions. We see them committing crimes with guns, so some traumatized citizens think that outlawing these weapons will solve the problem. But the weapons are neutral, in that is there is no more negative morality in a pistol than there is in a kitchen knife, a speeding automobile, a bottle of rat poison, an axe—or any other instrument that can be used to kill someone. The problem is wholly within the person that misuses these things! But we are not sure how to deal with and prevent criminals from misusing these instruments, so a misguided solution is to try to ban them, ignoring the other things that can be used to commit crimes.

I am a retired counselor, and for thirty years I dealt with murderers, child molesters, wife beaters, vehicular homicide offenders and other criminals, and I have learned that we cannot stop these people from committing their offenses by taking away their “tools.” They simply find another way to exact their violence upon us. So, instead of taking away their guns, we need to learn to control whatever it is in their psyches that impels them to maim, shoot, and destroy those people and things that the larger society values and wants to preserve. Basically the alternative to gun control is proper child rearing and rehabilitation of gun abusers. But we’re not very good at this. Meanwhile, we need to be able to protect ourselves.

Another aspect to consider is the reality that guns are now easily available “under the table” or on the black market, and always will be. Trying to keep weapons out of these marketers is folly. If we passed laws banning the use of and manufacture of all guns in the US, the manufacturing of them would simply go overseas to some other enterprising capitalists, and those in America who wanted guns would still find a way to get them. Banning a thing does not preclude its use. I offer Prohibition and our current illegal drug problems as evidence.

So we can see that there is no 100 percent solution by trying to create a society whereby we restrict or ban guns to the extent that we could reduce crimes to the level that the gun control people would wish. It is tragic that many people are killed by guns in our country, but many more are killed by traffic accidents and no one is proposing the banning of automobiles. We tend to focus on the violence that is on the pervasive news media, that which stirs our visceral, fearful feelings, and neglects other sorts of death and violence, which are often worse.

As an example, when the first Iraq war broke out a high Army official friend of mine came up to me in church, after the war had been raging for about a year and said, “You know Joe, I guess we ought to be thankful for this war as far as our troops are concerned.”
I looked at him as if he were crazy and asked how he could make such a statement.
He replied, “Well Joe, we’ve run some extensive statistical analyses and have found that less men are being killed in combat, and Iraq in general, than in comparable periods of peacetime when these soldiers are stationed in the US, doing their normal peacetime soldiering!”

He said that the facts about this were incontrovertible, and we finally concluded that the explanation had to be that while in the US, military personnel were getting killed in large numbers in auto accidents, home accidents, drunken brawls, from alcohol and drug abuse, murders, and assorted other “normal” ways we die in peacetime. An explanation that I hypothesized was that soldiers in combat were hyper alert to dangers to their lives, while here at home their guards were down and they were susceptible to accidents.

Recently an article in the Wall Street Journal noted that there were over three thousand auto-deer collisions per day in the US. This is over a million per year. How many deaths per year this involves was not stated, but the number has to be substantial. I have personal knowledge of friends being killed in this type of accident.

Let me conclude with what I believe is the ultimate argument for allowing responsible people to carry handguns and keeping whatever type of firearms they might wish in their homes. My aforementioned friend suggested this scenario. Suppose you are an ardent anti-gun citizen and a home invader enters your home and kills you and your family, which you might have been able to prevent had you owned a gun. Next, suppose some angel of mercy in the next life offers you an alternative, restoring your life and allowing you to go back to the moment just before you and your family are killed—only this time the angel will put a gun in your hand to defend yourself! Are you going to turn the gun down? I don’t think so.

A theological aspect to this whole issue is that believers of an afterlife might be inclined to go ahead and be murdered and go to heaven, which will be a better place anyway. And these people paradoxically tend to be the more fundamentally religious people—as evidenced by the Radical Muslims, who believe they will be rewarded by Allah for killing themselves and others by guns or other weapons. I have had very fundamentalist Christians somewhat of this mindset as clients, who are unafraid of death, because they believe they will go to a better world, especially if they rid the world of some undesirable people who do not follow God’s will.

But anti-gun atheists and agnostics are the hardest to understand. A pure atheist believes that there is no afterlife—that this life is it; once they are dead they no longer exist in this world or the imagined next one. But many of these folks are staunch advocates of strict gun control or abolishing them altogether. So one would think that they would be strongly in favor of anything that would protect them from dying, such as handguns for protection, because if someone kills them that is it! No more “them”—anywhere. There can be many psychological explanations for holding such attitudes, one of which is they just react against guns out of fear and have become non-thinkers in this regard. It’s possible they believe that a more perfect world can be created by by governments controlling the guns, and since they have no traditional religious beliefs, government is their “religion,” and they have no other recourse than to put their hopes and dreams of a more perfect world into government.

In summary there are many reasons people are against guns in general, and they conveniently ignore the 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution. But this country was liberated from Great Britain by citizen soldiers using their own weapons in most cases, and if they did not have weapons with which to fight, liberation would have been impossible.
So, let’s not go off half-cocked about gun control.